Judge Sonia Sotomayor and the New Racism: Getting Beyond the Politics of Denial

While many liberals suggest that with the election of Barack Obama to the presidency
the United States has become a post-racial society, many conservatives have
now taken the opposite position, prompted by the nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor
to the Supreme Court, that racism is alive and well in the republic.(1) According
to many right-wing pundits and politicians extending from Rush Limbaugh to Newt
Gingrich, Judge Sotomayor is a "racist" and a "bigot" because
of a largely decontextualized 32-word quote abstracted from a speech she gave
in 2001 in which she stated: "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with
the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion
than a white male who hasn't lived that life." Gingrich ignored the broader
context in which the quote appeared, arguing for critical reason over biography,
going so far as to suggest that it was symptomatic of a new type of racism,
exclaiming in Twitter-like fashion, "Imagine a judicial nominee said 'my
experience as a white man makes me better than a Latina woman' - new racism
is no better than old racism." All of this saber-rattling rhetoric about
the emergence of a new kind of racism, which insists rather ironically that
whites rather than people of color are the real victims of personal and institutional
racism, does more than suggest a kind of historical amnesia that actually rewrites
the meaning of racism. It also points to a long-standing fear among many conservatives
that diversity rather the bigotry is the real threat to democracy.

What the ongoing attack on Judge Sotomayor suggests is that the public morality
of American life and social policy regarding matters of racial justice are increasingly
subject to a politics of denial. Denial in this case is not merely about the
failure of public memory or the refusal to know, but an active ongoing attempt
on the part of many conservatives to rewrite the discourse of race so as to
deny its valence as a force for discrimination and exclusion either by translating
it as a threat to American culture or relegating it to the language of the private
sphere. The idea of race and the conditions of racism have real political effects
and eliding them only makes those effects harder to recognize. And yet, the
urgency to recognize how language is used to name, organize, order and categorize
matters of race not only has academic value, it also provides a location from
which to engage difference and the relationship between the self and the other
and between the public and private. In addition, the language of race is important
because it strongly affects political and policy agendas as well. One only has
to think about the effects of Charles Murray's book, "Losing Ground,"
on American welfare policies in the 1980s.(2) But language is more than a mode
of communication or a symbolic practice that produces real effects, it is also
a site of contestation and struggle

The charge that Judge Sotomayor is a racist suggests something about the changing
vocabulary about race and racial injustice that has to be both critically understood
and politically engaged. In fact, there is something called a new racism and
it has been brilliantly explored by a number of writers including David Theo
Goldberg, Elizabeth Ansell, Howard Winant and Manning Marable, among others,
though not in the way conservatives are using the term. Unlike the old racism,
which defined racial difference in terms of fixed biological categories organized
hierarchically, the new racism operates in various guises proclaiming, among
other things, race-neutrality, asserting culture as a marker of racial difference
or marking race as a private matter. Unlike the crude racism with its biological
referents and pseudo-scientific legitimations, buttressing its appeal to white
racial superiority, the new racism cynically recodes itself within the vocabulary
of the civil rights movement, invoking the language of Martin Luther King Jr.
to argue that individuals should be judged by the "content of their character"
and not by the color of their skin. What is crucial about the new racism is
that it demands an updated analysis of how racist practices work through the
changing nature of language and other modes of representation. One of the most
sanitized and yet pervasive forms of the new racism is evident in the language
of color-blindness and the ideology of privatization. Within this approach,
it is argued that racial conflict and discrimination is a thing of the past
and that race has no bearing on an individual's or group's location or standing
in contemporary American society. Color-blindness does not deny the existence
of race, but the claim that race is responsible for alleged injustices that
reproduce group inequalities, privilege whites, negatively impacts on economic
mobility, the possession of social resources and the acquisition of political
power. Put differently, inherent in the logic of color-blindness is the central
assumption that race has no valence as a marker of identity or power when factored
into the social vocabulary of everyday life and the capacity for exercising
individual and social agency. In an era "free" of racism, race becomes
a matter of taste, lifestyle or heritage, but has nothing to do with politics,
legal rights, educational access or economic opportunities. Moreover, as politics
becomes more racialized, the discourse about race becomes more privatized. Veiled
by a denial of how racial histories accrue political, economic and cultural
weight to the social power of whiteness, color-blindness and the privatization
of racism deletes the relationship between racial differences and power and
in doing so reinforces whiteness as the arbiter of value for judging difference
against a normative notion of homogeneity.(3) For advocates of color-blindness,
race as a political signifier is conveniently denied, relegated to the historical
past, or defined merely as an individual prejudice or simply a matter of individualized
choices, allowing many conservatives to ignore racism as a corrosive force for
expanding the dynamics of ideological and structural inequality throughout society.(4)
Color-blindness is a convenient ideology for enabling whites to ignore the degree
to which race is tangled up with asymmetrical relations of power, functioning
as a potent force for patterns of exclusion and discrimination including. but
not limited to, housing, mortgage loans, health care, schools and the criminal
justice system. This is the issue missing from the current debate about the
new racism being put forth by Gingrich and others.

If one effect of color-blindness functions is to deny racial hierarchies, another
consequence is that it offers whites not only the belief that America is now
a level playing field, but that the success that whites enjoy relative to minorities
of color is largely due to individual determination, a strong work ethic, high
moral values and a sound investment in education. Not only does color-blindness
offer up a highly racialized (though paraded as race-transcendent) notion of
agency, but it also provides an ideological space free of guilt, self-reflection
and political responsibility, despite the fact that blacks have a disadvantage
in almost all areas of social life: housing, jobs, education, income levels,
mortgage lending and basic everyday services.(5) In a society marked by profound
racial and class inequalities, it is difficult to believe that character and
merit - as color-blindness advocates would have us believe - are the prime determinants
for social and economic mobility and a decent standard of living. The relegation
of racism and its effects in the larger society to the realm of private beliefs,
values, and behavior does little to explain a range of overwhelming realities–such
as soaring black unemployment, the stepped-up resegregation of American schools
and the growing militarization and lock down status of public education through
the widespread use of zero tolerance policies, whose most egregious effects
are on poor minority youth.(6) Or the fact that African-American males live
on average six years less than their white counterparts. It is worth noting
that nothing challenges the myth that America has become a color-blind, post-racist
nation more than the racialization of the criminal justice system since the
late 1980s. As the sociologist Loic Wacquant has observed, the expansion of
the prison-industrial complex represents a "de facto policy of 'carceral
affirmative action' towards African-Americans."(7) This is born out by
the fact that while American prisons house over 2.3 million inmates, "roughly
half of them are black even though African-Americans make up less than 13 percent
of the nation's population.... According to the Justice Policy Institute, there
are now more black men behind bars than in college in the United States. One
in ten of the world's prisoners is an African-American male."(8)

As one of the most powerful ideological and institutional factors for deciding
how identities are categorized and power, material privileges and resources
distributed, race represents an essential political category for examining the
relationship between justice and a democratic society. What the Sotomayor debate
suggests is that far from being relegated to the past, racism in its various
forms can be resurrected for both attacking minorities of color and for appropriating
victim status for whites, while suggesting that people of color are the "real"
racists. How else to explain Newt Gingrich's charge that Judge Sotomayor is
a "Latina woman racist" or Karl Rove's charge that she is "not
necessarily" smart, resurrecting elements of genetic racism. Rather than
simply defend Sotomayor against such racist charges, it may be time for progressives
and others to take the debate about racism a step further and engage in a real
dialogue about the historical legacy of the new racism and how it functions
in American society, particularly as it seeks to suggest that the main victims
of racism in its various rhetorical and institutional guises are white men.

Bob Herbert has recently responded to the attacks on Judge Sotomayor by arguing
that:

Here's the thing. Suddenly these hideously pompous and self-righteous
white males of the right are all concerned about racism. They're so concerned
that they're fully capable of finding it in places where it doesn't for a moment
exist. Not just finding it, but being outraged by it to the point of apoplexy.
Oh, they tell us, this racism is a bad thing! Are we supposed to not notice
that these are the tribunes of a party that rose to power on the filthy waves
of racial demagoguery.... Where were the howls of outrage at this strategy that
was articulated by Lee Atwater as follows: "By 1968, you can't say 'nigger'
- that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights,
and all that stuff."(9)

Herbert is only partly right on this issue. The right-wing attack on Sotomayor
is about more than "the howling of a fading species." It is about
how racism takes on different forms in different historical contexts and the
need for it to be challenged critically and politically. Of course, Herbert
is correct in suggesting that the conservative appropriation of the new racism
is not just disingenuous but hypocritical, and that even a minor lesson in history
reveals the bigotry behind the strategy. But he is remiss in not suggesting
that we actually take up the discourse of the new racism and do it in ways that
give it real meaning and substance, so it can be both easily recognized and
politically challenged in terms not set by conservatives.

(3) This issue is taken up brilliantly in David Theo Goldberg's, "The Racial
State" (Malden, MA: Blackwell Books, 2002) and David Theo Goldberg's, "The
Threat of Race: Reflections on Racial Neoliberalism" (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell,
2009).

(7) Loic Wacquant, "From Slavery to Mass Incarceration: Rethinking the
'Race Question' in the U.S." in New Left Review, (Jan-Feb 2002), p. 44.

(8) Paul Street, "Mass Incarceration and Racist State Priorities at Home
and Abroad," DissidentVoice (March 11, 2003), pp. 6-7 Available on line
at http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Articles2/Street_MassIncarceration.htm. See
also, Jennifer Warren, "One in 100: Behind Bars in America 2008" (Washington,
DC: The PEW Center on the States, 2008).

(9) Bob Herbert, "The Howls of a Fading Species," New York Times (June
2, 2009), p. A23.

Henry A. Giroux currently holds the Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department. He has taught at Boston University, Miami University of Ohio, and Penn State University. His most recent books include: Youth in a Suspect Society (Palgrave, 2009); Politics After Hope: Obama and the Crisis of Youth, Race, and Democracy (Paradigm, 2010); Hearts of Darkness: Torturing Children in the War on Terror (Paradigm, 2010); and he is working on two new books titled Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism and Education and the Crisis of Public Values, both of which will be published in 2011 by Peter Lang Publishers. Giroux is also a member of Truthout's Board of Directors. His website is www.henryagiroux.com.